In Speech, Obama Calls Jobs Report a ‘Hopeful Sign’

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — President Obama came to this aging factory town in Pennsylvania’s Rust Belt on Friday to promote his efforts to revitalize the American economy, and wound up with an early Christmas present of sorts in the form of the report showing an improving employment situation.

“This is good news, just in time for the season of hope,” Mr. Obama said in a speech at Lehigh Carbon Community College in suburban Allentown. “I’ve got to admit, my chief economist, Christy Romer, she got about four hugs when she handed us the report. But I do want to keep this in perspective. We’ve still got a long way to go.”

But if Obama administration officials were exchanging hugs, they were also keenly aware that Friday’s report, which showed that 11,000 jobs disappeared in November, as opposed to the six-figure job losses many economists had expected, is only “moderately encouraging news,” as Mr. Obama himself said here.

Democrats in the administration and in Congress said the report would not slow their immediate plans for further stimulus measures. The White House and Congressional Democratic leaders proceeded Friday with plans to allocate as much as $170 billion to aid those without jobs and to create new jobs.

The House and Senate have agreed to add roughly $100 billion in extended emergency benefits for the long-term unemployed to the final spending bill for this fiscal year, which they hope to send to Mr. Obama before Christmas.

The unemployment measure would extend provisions in the $787 billion economic stimulus package that otherwise would expire at the end of the month, and leave an estimated one million people without compensation in January. It also would extend food stamp benefits and a subsidy to help the unemployed keep their health insurance.

Separately, House leaders are moving a bill providing roughly $70 billion for additional building projects and aid to local and state governments so they are not forced to lay off teachers and first responders. The bill would also expand lending to small businesses, which say credit lines from banks remain frozen.

To offset the cost, Democrats propose to use unspent money from the $700 billion bailout fund for financial institutions, and the White House has agreed to go along after initial hesitance. Republicans on Friday objected that the bailout balance should go toward the deficit. They said little about the jobs report, however, in contrast with past months when they were quick to seize on rising unemployment to claim that Democratic policies had failed.

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On a “White House to Main Street” tour swing through Allentown, Pa., President Obama toured Allentown Metal Works.Credit
Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

As both parties head into next year’s midterm elections, the jobs issue will be front and center. But Friday’s better-than-expected new jobless figures gave Democrats hope that the coming election year would not be as bad for the party as many had feared.

“If the trends continue — and I underline ‘if’— the economy will soon be producing jobs rather than shedding jobs, and the debate will shift,” said a senior administration official, speaking anonymously to discuss strategy. This official said Democrats hoped to put Republicans on the defensive with language like “You handed us an economy that was shedding 700,000 jobs a month, and we managed an economy that finally started to produce jobs.”

Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, said Democrats could win even if people were dissatisfied with the economy, so long as they thought it was getting better. “The more we can move people from the ‘dissatisfied and not getting better’ category to the ‘dissatisfied but getting better’ category, the better off Democrats will be for 2010,” Mr. Garin said.

Mr. Obama is facing his own pressures. His fellow Democrats have been grumbling for weeks that he has seemed disengaged from the nation’s economic woes as he grapples with Afghanistan and health care. The administration is now renewing its focus on the economy. Mr. Obama held a White House jobs summit on Thursday, and on Tuesday, he will unveil proposals to help businesses expand hiring in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning research group.

The Allentown swing, the first of a series of trips that the administration is billing as a “White House to Main Street” tour, was intended to humanize the effort. The president spent Friday hop-scotching across the city memorialized in the 1980s Billy Joel tune as the place where “they’re closing all the factories down.”

At Allentown Metal Works, a complex of cavernous aging red-brick factory buildings, he met with men in hardhats who are working on components for the transportation hub underneath the new World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. He ate a cheeseburger and fries (his standard average-guy lunch) at a local diner, where he chatted up local business leaders.

At a career counseling center, he encouraged unemployed workers to keep looking for jobs, telling them, “I just want you to know I’m thinking about you every day.” He wrapped up his day at the Nestlé Purina pet food factory, where he arrived between shift changes to shake the hands of more than 180 employees, clad in blue work uniforms and ball caps, who lined up single file to greet him one by one.

In his speech at the community college, the president tried to personalize the issue, saying his own family was not immune.

“I know times are tough,” he said. “Michelle and I were talking the other day — there are members of our families that are out of work. We’re not that far removed from struggling to pay the bills. Five, six years ago, we were still paying off student loans. Still trying to figure out if we pay this bill this month, what do we have to give up next month. We’re not that far away from there.”